Hey,

This week we are continuing our series on Facebook Ads (previous episodes here) but before we jump into that, let me quickly highlight an updated resource on my site.

My curated guide to the very best book promotion sites has been updated for 2022. And by “curated,” I mean that every site mentioned is there for its ability to move the needle at a reasonable price, but also in the sense that I have grouped together the best sites for a free promotion, a 99¢ sale, and a series promotion, as well as highlighting genre specialists, money-savers, and list-builders too. Not only that, but there’s a video on the page which will show you how to put together several of these promotions for maximum effect.

These promo sites are incredibly useful for virtually any kind of author at any stage in their career. Even when I’m managing giant launches for chart-topping authors, the very first thing I do is open this page and start booking promo sites – it’s the foundation of every single launch and promotion I run, no matter what the budget.

For beginners especially, I strongly recommend that you spend your first marketing dollars on these sites, rather than Facebook Ads (or Amazon Ads/BookBub Ads, for that matter). These sites will usually generate far cheaper clicks through to your books than any advertising, and using these sites doesn’t require any specialist knowledge. Their only real downside, I guess, is that there isn’t enough of them and to really scale up you need something like Facebook Ads to truly amplify your launch or promotion.

So let’s crack on!

As a quick recap, we looked at the Campaign level last week – where you basically tell Facebook what you want to do with your ads, so that it knows who should see them. In our case, we want traffic to our Amazon listings, as we are aiming to sell books, so we chose the “Traffic” campaign type – and I spend quite a bit of time last week explaining why that choice is so important, and how it influences lots of other things. Today, we get much deeper into ad creation.

Episode 2: The Ad Set

I had some confused emails from people who were struggling to find Ads Manager in their interface – not helped by Facebook’s system trying to nudge them towards boosting a post instead, which is not what you want. If you are having trouble, simply click this link - https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager - which should take you to your own Ads Manager, from where you can follow the instructions in last week’s email (see link above) for the Campaign level.

This week: The Ad Set level.

You really need to pay attention to the choices you make at the Ad Set level – these are the settings which will make or break your ad – settings which decide:

• where on Facebook your ads appear (and elsewhere)

• what countries your ads run in (and who exactly sees them)

• how much you pay for each set of eyeballs (and your overall budget).

...and the choices you make here will directly or indirectly affect lots of other things too, so let’s break it down step-by-step in your Facebook interface.

I will go through the Ad Set level here using the labels Facebook itself uses for each section, so you can follow along easily. Remember, nothing goes live until you click Publish at the very end, and you can save your campaign as a draft and come back to it later, if you wish, so do feel free to follow along.

Ad Set Name / Traffic / Dynamic creative

The first three sections don’t need much explanation at this point. You will come up with your own naming system that works for you over time, and the second section can simply be skipped – you are sending traffic to a website, which is the default selected. You will specify the exact website in the next stage, don’t worry. And you can ignore Dynamic Creative for now – that’s for more advanced/niche uses.

Budget & schedule

Here’s where you need to focus. Mistakes here can be… expensive.

Unlike some other ad platforms, Facebook generally has no problem spending whatever budget you allot, unless you mess something up in the rest of your settings, so remember to be cautious here. Only budget what you genuinely can afford to spend. And if these are your first ads, only budget what you genuinely can afford to lose – because even with all the best guidance in the world, your first ads will probably be losers until you get more experience.

Keep the budgets low in other words. But how low?

You can run campaigns for as little as a dollar a day, but I don’t recommend going quite that low or else Facebook’s fancy machine learning won’t kick in. Let me explain.

Facebook’s system is quite advanced these days and deploys all sorts of AI wizardry to help advertisers (even if it doesn’t feel like that when learning the ropes!). Facebook (in)famously knows a lot about its users and it deploys that knowledge on your behalf to determine who will see your ads.

We spoke about this a little last week when talking about Campaign objectives – i.e. if you choose a Traffic campaign, Facebook will serve your ads to users more likely to click on things, but if you choose an Engagement campaign, Facebook will instead serve your ads to users more likely to engage in a very direct sense, as in Like or comment or share. And those can be two very different segments of the audience.

Facebook will dig even deeper and try to find the most responsive sub-set of that audience to your individual ad, and switch up who sees it on the fly, without your intervention. It’s pretty nifty, and the only drawback is that it takes about 50 clicks on your ad before Facebook can really hone in on the ideal persons to view your ad. And those 50 clicks have to happen in a 7-day period, so you need enough of a budget to make that happen – and $1 a day just won’t cut it.

So, I recommend $5 a day as the minimum. You are free to go higher of course – and a higher budget generally means you will get more clicks faster and exit the learning phase quicker – just remember my advice above about only budgeting what you can afford to spend/lose, because Facebook almost certainly will spend it! (And with your first ads, you will almost certainly lose it...)

The final thing I recommend here is to put an End Date on your ad set – see the red circle in the above screenshot. Amazon Ads veterans might be wary of doing this because the advice is different on that platform, but on Facebook it’s always smart to put an end date on your campaigns and doesn’t adversely affect performance in any way. It also prevents a bad ad racking up considerable spend in case anything happens to you (I learned the hard way – an expensive lesson).

Audience

This is where things get complicated so be careful when following along. In the future, you will have saved audiences and later on you will have valuable custom audiences and perhaps even lookalike audiences, but don’t worry about any of that right now and skip that field altogether. We will certainly return to that in the future. For now, we are just building a simple ad to sell some books on Amazon using interest targeting – i.e. some combination of comp authors and/or your genre.

In the “Locations” sub-section, the country you are residing in will probably be the default, but I recommend switching that (if necessary) to the United States, which is the best place for beginners to start running ads… unless your books really are of mostly local interest in some other country.

Now, you don’t want to run an ad to everyone in the United States who uses Facebook – which is approximately 280m people! Even Facebook’s impressive machine learning can’t tackle that task. So we need to narrow that audience down.

At this point – for most authors certainly – I recommend actually skipping the demographic filters – age, gender, and so on. I’m aware this might contradict advice you have heard elsewhere, so take this part with as much salt as you like. But I feel like Facebook’s machine learning is really great at this particular part, and can make better and quicker decisions than me.

(On that note: I’m fully aware of the demographic segments which respond best to my books, by the way, which is women aged 35-55, and before Facebook used so much machine learning, I would often restrict my ads to that slice of the market, and my ads were much more profitable as a result. These days, I do the opposite: I show my ad to all ages/genders and let Facebook handle that part – and it works great.)

Unless you have specific circumstances which argue otherwise, I recommend skipping those sections. (For example, a romance author may feel that showing ads to men is a waste of time, or more trouble than its worth – with justification – or an author of books on financial planning for retirees may wish to dodge young people altogether, etc.).

Here’s where we really narrow the audience effectively: with what Facebook calls “Detailed targeting.”

It’s such an important setting and Facebook makes it almost imperceptible – indeed, you have to hover over the “Detailed targeting” subsection to even make the “Edit” link viewable (see screenshot below).

Once you click that “Edit” link a whole world of targeting choices opens up. Indeed, speaking about all the options here – and how best to use them – would fill an email all on its own. Several emails, in fact, if we really got into it. Targeting truly can make or break an ad. Good thing Facebook hides it so well, eh?

Anyway, when you click on Detailed targeting, a search box appears (see below) where you can type in anything you like. Facebook doesn’t give you a menu here, so you have to go a-hunting. As you can see below, if you type in something like “thriller”… and wait a second or two… Facebook will present you with some options you can select, or not. And if you hover over each one, it will estimate the relevant audience size. In this case, I chose Political Thrillers which has an estimated audience size in the USA of around 3m.

Let’s be generous with the runway here, for now, and just say that you should shoot for an audience between, say, 10,000 and around 3m-ish. Those audiences might sound very big if you are used to other ad platforms, but that fancy machine learning I spoke about will do some of the narrowing work for you on the fly. Facebook is generally better these days at targeting big audiences than small ones. Besides, that audience will shrink as we choose further options below, and in practice the audiences tend to be smaller anyway, so don’t sweat it.

What should you target exactly? I recommend conducting quite a few searches at this point, and noting down the results. Run through your comp authors and various niches. Many of them simply won’t exist on Facebook – there are less targeting options than on some other platforms. Facebook will seem a bit… old school in that sense. Medium-to-big trad authors might be targetable, and some of the biggest indies with millions of readers are not. It’s quite patchy overall and some genres (like romance) have a lot more targeting options than others.

You will have to do some work here and run through lots of comp authors and various ways of describing the niches you work in, and see what is targetable. Just don’t be afraid of targeting huge authors.

Facebook is not like BookBub Ads or Amazon Ads in this sense – where targeting household names can sometimes be the quickest path to penury. You are likely to find that even the giants of your genre can be workable targets for you on Facebook, where bigger audiences can be more viable overall.

If the interest you select results in a big audience (I’m talking like 1m+) then it’s probably best that you don’t add anything else to it for now. But if it is on the smaller end of the spectrum, then consider adding a few more interests to increase the size of the audience.

Here’s one way that audience shrinks immediately: we are going to manually narrow it further by Kindle users. We are specifically aiming to sell ebooks on Amazon with this ad, so we should only target people who buy ebooks on Amazon.

Click that “Narrow Audience” button which I’ve highlighted in the screenshot below.

When you do that, a second search box will open up, similar to the last. On this level, we are going to simply type in “Kindle” and select a couple of things which pop up. You need to be careful here that you select the right audience – hovering over the options will give you the audience size. You will notice one of the “Amazon Kindle” options is only an audience of a few thousand people, but if you read the accompanying text, you’ll see that’s because it’s people who work in Amazon’s Kindle department. (Facebook really does know a lot about us!)

Instead, select the “Amazon Kindle” audience in the tens of millions, and also the similarly sized “Kindle Store” audience while you are at it. And that’s it for the targeting section… for now.

We will return to targeting in a future episode, I’m sure, but there’s one more really important thing before we move on: do not enable “Detailed targeting expansion” for the love of all things holy. It will really mess with your ads, and Facebook gives a hard push to you to switch this on. Don’t. This is one area where we need to put hard rails around Facebook’s AI or it will veer into the ditch.

It tries to do something smart. It looks at what you have targeted and automatically adds in similar interests. Which sounds cool but can do things like add Kobo users to an Amazon-focused ad – segments which might look similar to a robot who doesn’t understand the nuances for authors. Kobo users are unlikely to suddenly start buying ebooks from Amazon, no matter how good your ads are!

Leave that box unticked, and move on.

Placements

We have just two sections left and can handle both quickly… but perhaps not without controversy. Placements is where on the web you want your ads to run, and I don’t just recommend restricting your ads to Facebook, but one single spot on Facebook: News Feed (which is the "home" feed you probably spend most time on when using Facebook - and where the ads are bigger and generally much more visible... without being obnoxiously intrusive).

Some might vehemently disagree with this, but I have tested this relentlessly. Other placements on (and off) Facebook generally result in far cheaper clicks than you get from News Feed, but that traffic is often junk traffic which simply doesn’t convert into book sales at anything like the same rates.

Views differ on this, so feel free to disregard my advice on this if you wish, but I do feel quite strongly about it. (As with anything, weigh all the arguments and make your own mind up – preferably through testing and data as well.)

If you do want to follow my advice, change the default by selecting “Manual placements” instead – and then you must laboriously untick everything except “Facebook News Feed” in the sub-menu which appears.

Optimisation & Delivery

Nearly there, people.

I actually don’t touch anything in this section these days, but I get away with that because I’m experienced and my ads are generally quite good and usually require a moderate bit of tweaking to succeed.

Beginner’s ads generally don’t perform as well, so you might want to be more cautious here.

Don’t touch the “Optimisation and delivery” section either way. This is a Traffic campaign, designed to sell books on Amazon, and you want your ads optimized for Link Clicks. Ignore all the other options there, by the way, including Landing Page Views – which is not relevant for ads to Amazon (it’s more for experienced advertisers sending traffic to their site, which we are not interested in right now).

The section you might want to fiddle with, to help you control costs better is – you guessed it! – “Cost control.”

Facebook will automatically try to get you the cheapest clicks possible for your budget, but if you are ads are a bit off, costs can spiral quickly. Some authors prefer putting in a max CPC here to ensure things don’t get too crazy. So feel free to put in something you definitely don’t want Facebook to exceed in terms of click costs – like 50¢ or perhaps 75¢.

That might sound high, but Facebook needs a bit of wiggle room during the learning phase – those first 50 clicks we spoke about earlier, before that fancy machine learning kicks in. During this phase, you might see some very high CPCs come in for the first few clicks before Facebook really zeroes in on the audience who will deliver the cheapest clicks for you. (And that’s especially true if you don’t use the Cost Control section at all, as I do.)

Want a more specific recommendation? Put in 50¢ for now to be cautious, but if your ad doesn’t really run at all, then push that out to maybe 75¢ so that the system has more room to conduct the learning phase.

We will certainly be striving for cheaper clicks than that, though, this is just an extra safety net in case the ads are an epic fail.

Coming Soon

That’s it (phew!) for the Ad Set level. Next time: the Ad level – which won’t nearly be as long (double phew!) but does include very important stuff like the ad images which will hook your targets and the ad text which will close the deal.

Until then,

Dave

P.S. Writing choon this week is Roxy Music with Virginia Plain.